D.C. is seeking private sector partners to supply, install and maintain solar panels on nearly 50 city-owned buildings, with the goal of generating 10 megawatts of electricity and significantly offsetting the “brown power” use at those facilities.

The “green” procurement could potentially double the number of solar panels currently installed in the District, said Mark Chambers, sustainability manager for the Department of General Services.

“This scale makes it more viable for some of the larger players to be involved,” Chambers said. “The benefit to them is in the long-term agreement. The goal is to have consumption over a long period of time.”

DGS has issued a solicitation for one or more companies to install and maintain the panels on 49 municipal buildings, including 37 schools, the John A. Wilson Building, the police training academy and St. Elizabeths Hospital.

Those buildings use 86.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity in a single year. By layering solar panels across 10,355 square feet of roofs and carports, DGS expects to generate 12.2 million kilowatt hours, offsetting 14 percent of their annual consumption.

The District uses roughly 400 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually across all of its properties.

According to the solicitation, D.C. intends to enter into a 20-year power purchasing agreement with its contractors to buy all of the electricity that’s fed from the panels into Pepco’s grid. The price will be fixed, Chambers said, “to protect us against the volatility of brown power.”

The 49 buildings are broken up into three bundles to allow for more competition among potential solar installers. The sites were selected on the basis of completed feasibility studies.

The small bundle consists of 16 sites with a total solar capacity of 1.5 MW. The large bundle has 29 sites and 7.6 MW capacity. A third bundle consists of four sites — Brookland Middle School, the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, Roosevelt and Ballou high schools — with a solar capacity of 1.2 MW.

The four buildings in the demonstration bundle are currently in the planning or construction stages, which allows for some creativity with regard to the solar potential.

Companies can bid on one, two or all three bundles.

“Time is of the essence with respect to the implementation of these solar energy projects," the solicitation states. "The department anticipates that all the projects will begin commercial operations no later than 2015.”

On a related note, the District is negotiating with a still-unnamed vendor from which to purchase renewable wind energy, based on a solicitation issued nearly a year ago. The solar and wind procurements are part of D.C.’s “decarbonization strategy,” Chambers said.